WHERE'S MOTHER?

An intimate excavation of emotional lives in the wake of a separation.

This novel follows Margaret Drake, a mother and professor who struggles with her mental and physical health after her husband, Tom, leaves her. She copes by overworking herself and dating frequently until she moves the family to Nashville to help a drifter boyfriend chase his vague country music dreams. The book is divided into three parts, titled to describe how the separation affects three different characters: “Boiling the Frog,” “Time Out,” and “Shame.” The story begins in the voice of 15-year-old eldest daughter Laura, who finds herself sacrificing her social life and academic aspirations to parent her younger siblings in her mother’s absence. In the second section, Tom, the father and husband who instigated the book’s events, explains how an intellectual experiment leads to his decision to separate from his family, what he learns during that separation, and how he reacts to hearing about his wife’s condition. Finally, the book ends in Margaret’s words, showing the reflections of a woman struggling to handle rejection by the man she loves. Leigh-Taylor’s mastery of tone and technique shines through in the three different characters she creates: Short, succinct and matter-of-fact phrasing belies Laura’s bitterness, exhaustion, and, ultimately, youth, suppressed beneath practical urgencies; Tom’s lack of emotional intelligence and self-absorption are reflected in his logical but ultimately self-centered descriptions of every situation; and, suitably for an English professor, Margaret’s descriptions of her mental state are often heartbreakingly eloquent. The author uses the “lost” mother’s eloquence and hindsight to expound on the effects of powerlessness, rejection, guilt, and shame. Yet despite the depth of insight that Leigh-Taylor’s triple-perspective technique enables, the story’s resolution feels rushed and the ending, incomplete—simply summarizing the aftermath of Margaret’s physically and emotionally devastating disappearances rather than exploring them. As a result, this may make the reader question how Margaret arrived at her “lesson” that “being helpless could be a blessing.”

A largely well-crafted dissection of mental health that speaks to the messiness of modern relationships.